Hi, I'm Dan

"Front of House Confidential" excerpt

Hi, I’m Dan, and I run restaurants.  Wait, that doesn’t sound right, and this isn’t an AA meeting. But really, it’s just Dan. I’ve long answered the phone in a professional capacity as Daniel, ever since anglophones and francophones staged a coup over the restaurant industry – aka “the biz” – during the early/mid-aughts, and shortened names went out of vogue.  I’ve never been a “Danny,” unless you’re one of the Song brothers I grew up with, or my bartender-mentor.  If you ever want to truly piss me the fuck off, call me Danny. I guaran-goddamn-tee you won’t do that again. Content warning: I swear a lot and have a lot of opinions.  As the young’uns like to say, sorry-not-sorry.

As of this writing, I’ve been in the biz just shy of 30 years.  I know, that’s a lot, right?  I’ve seen and applauded a rebirth of regional American cuisine, disparaged the growth of national restaurant companies and the economic conditions which favor those chains’ growth.  I’ve witnessed the corrosion of public deportment in restaurants, the vulgar worsening of how restaurant patrons treat the hard-working people who serve them.  I’ve worked my way from bouncer at a college dive bar to HMFIC.  I once briefly owned part of a restaurant, and learned firsthand the painful truth that up to 90% of independent restaurants fail in their first year.  I ran many more operations for other people, which I prefer, so that other people who are not me can concentrate on net operating income while I run day-to-day service.  Like the Dead once sang, “lately it’s occurred to me, what a long, strange trip it’s been,” but hopefully what you’re about to read will take you along on that journey.

I often tell people, but with increasing frequency after 2019, that I still like the biz, but I don’t love it anymore.  I used to love it.  I used to live and breathe it because the dopamine from a busy shift is still one of the best natural highs imaginable.  In my twenties and thirties, thirteen-hour double shifts didn’t faze me, unless we were slow.  If we were slow, that’s when mistakes get made, tempers flare, and the tiniest tic from a fellow server/bartender/food runner/host/manager will annoy you more than a brat younger sibling trying to poke you during a long car ride.  If we were busy, and the crew knew its shit, we fed off each other’s energy, all of us running our asses off to make sure our guests felt welcomed and left happy.  Long before the preponderance of online reviews that have become a sort of instant gratification for restaurant people, that high was almost its own reward. 

I still feel this, but less frequently.  Few restaurants take the time and do the work to forge their front of house into a cohesive team.  Few restaurants want to ensure that the front of the house is happy, either with their coworkers or the establishment.  We still measure overall success in total sales and total number of covers served (one cover is one guest who orders either an entrée or two appetizers).  Thanks to analytics, we now also measure such things as average number of desserts sold per server per cover, or side dish sales, or whose wine sales are higher than their peers.  We’ve gone from an industry founded on serving food and drink to one where every transaction can be tracked and quantified; the lower your score, the lower your value to the operation.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m just as guilty of this quantification myself, but every time I’ve done this, I felt more distance between me and my roots in the biz.

I grew up mostly in New York City, the product of a nascent Korean American community whose arrival was spurred by the passage of the Hart-Celler Act of 1965.  The act finally got rid of the quota system that artificially limited immigration from non-European countries.  Since Korea was essentially a Third World country at the time, thousands of young people including my parents came over to seek better lives.  My father, Don (Kim Dong-Ung), met my mother, Bo (Eun Bo-Gyeong), on a blind date – this was, surprisingly, how many of their peers met, if not at one of the churches that served as a social linchpin for the Korean American community. 

Problem. 

Don was from Gyeongsang-do Province in the southern part of the country, specifically Taegu; Bo was from Seoul, which has considered itself the center of Korean civilization probably since our ancestors worshipped rocks and trees.  Picture, if you will, the scion of a Southern evangelical family that did everything loudly, from eating to praying to simply talking on the telephone.  Now imagine that young man marrying the daughter of a stiff-upper-lip New England school headmaster, and whose wife’s nicer way of describing people from Gyeongsang-do was calling them uncouth bumpkins.  I remember my dad flattening his more melodic accent to match my grandfather’s proper news anchor voice every time my grandparents visited from Korea.  I also remember the sheer volume of the table conversation whenever I was around my dad’s family.  Holy shit, they were loud. 

I also chalk up my inherited tolerance to alcohol to Don’s side of the family, as evidenced by a trip to Korea when I was thirteen.  We had dinner in a Taegu restaurant, with up to thirty people there, all trying to talk over the person next to them.  My mother had a look on her face like she was dying inside. One of my great-uncles slapped me on the thigh under the table.  When I looked down, I saw his hand holding a small glass of soju.  When I looked up, his eyes were glassy and struggled to focus on my face.  “You’re a member of this family,” he slurred, “so you should learn how to drink like one.  Hurry up, drink before your mother sees.”  Honestly, that was one of my last clear memories of that night, because if you haven’t been initiated into the Sacred Order of Soju, it’s a clear Korean liquor distilled from every starch from sweet potatoes to tapioca, whose mild taste belies the next morning’s raging hangover.  Judging from how sluggish my dad and I were the next day, and headaches that made us wish for a Korean equivalent of seppuku to stop the pain, I was experiencing my first hangover.

My ethnicity is, as you can imagine, a large part of my identity.  My family attended a Korean church, where the repast after service always included Korean food that allowed me to discover things like kosari (stems from fernbrake or fiddlehead ferns), bean sprouts made differently than my mom’s, savory pancakes made from rice or mung bean flour with an assortment of fillings, and a dizzying array of other banchan, the vegetable side dishes that could comprise a meal in their own right.  For special occasions like after a holiday service, one of the church ajummas would have made japchae, rice vermicelli with beef and vegetables.  Making japchae is a meticulous process that involves cooking each component of the dish separately, then combining them at the end just before serving.  Every time I saw this dish, whether it was at our house, someone else’s house, or at church, meant I had to find whoever made it to thank them because of the effort involved.  Then there was the kimchi, about which every Korean and Korean American is a self-proclaimed expert.  Korean food was always just … there.  It was the background music to the score that eventually became my life, with occasional crescendos like when I discovered a love for kimchi jjigae (stew) that I still enjoy, especially when it’s served to me still boiling on a hundred-degree summer day. 

My mother is still the best living cook I know, and since I’m an only child, she would let me hang out in the kitchen.  It wasn’t until I was ten, though, and spent a summer in Korea with my maternal grandparents, that I realized that my grandma’s cooking was damn near a religious experience.  I was a kid having the culinary version of speaking in tongues at my grandparents’ table, only saying no when both grandparents insisted I drink ginseng tea that smelled like it had been strained through dirty underwear.  Fried croaker, pork knuckles with fermented shrimp sauce, seafood pancakes, whole broiled red snapper swimming in a sauce of soy and ginger and dried chili flakes, a bewildering array of different kimchis – my grandmother refused to buy kimchi, and although I’m not an impartial judge, hers, stored on her apartment balcony year-round, was magnificent.  Naturally, it also made a great kimchi jjigae once it had ripened enough.

One thing Grandma did, and which I didn’t appreciate for another twenty years until I attended culinary school, was that unlike many Korean women of her generation, she rarely added extra salt, much less the MSG that was en vogue throughout Korea at the time.  She let the flavors in the food she was cooking speak for themselves, a necessary evil considering the hypertension that would kill her at age sixty.  Towards that end, she even largely cut red meat from her diet, but sweet Jesus H Christ on a motorbike, could that woman cook meat.  She would taste while she cooked, but not partake.  As her firstborn (and male!) grandchild and therefore her little, if chubby, prince, the sights and sounds of me “eating well,” as Koreans are wont to say, were her reward.  Fast forward a few decades, and my mother gives my kids the exact same misty proud look whenever they’re devouring something she made.